Debit cards distributed by financial institutions are typically forwarded to retail merchants for sale to individual purchasers. These cards allow the holder prepaid access to existing credit networks for making purchases, eliminating the need to carry cash on hand. They may be used to provide authorization for the rental or purchase of goods and services, or may be used as a gift certificate granting the holder credit for various goods and services.
It has been the practice with prepaid debit cards that a merchant purchases a stock of cards just as he would any other good, at which time he incurs a charge from the vendor for the value of the debit card. By displaying these cards for sale in his store, the merchant exposes himself to the loss of the valuable cards through shrinkage and theft. Furthermore, the merchant must maintain individual inventory stocks for each different value of debit card he wishes to sell. the merchant's working capital is restricted by the need to maintain these stocks well in advance of when the debit cards are actually sold as retail items to individual purchasers.
To address these problems, merchants have begun to sell non activated, or “zero balance” debit cards which have no intrinsic value until they are activated by the merchant's magnetic card reader. It is now a common practice to sell such cards to purchasers with the activation taking place at the merchant counter at the time of sale.
In this manner, the merchant reduces his overhead because the value of the inactivated debit cards is not payable to the wholesale vendor of the cards until the card itself is actually distributed by the merchant at the point of sale (“POS”). Theft is also no longer a concern given that the inactivated debit cards have very little value.
Upon sale of a debit card to a purchaser, the merchant encodes the debit card with a specific balance paid for by the purchaser. To do so, the magnetic stripe on the debit card must be exposed so that the card itself may be passed through the merchant's magnetic card reader. These cards are often sold mounted in or on some sort of card carrier or protective/display packaging. In order to keep this packaging from interfering with the encoding operation carried out by the merchant at the time of purchase, prior art packages exist wherein a card is mounted so that it is permanently exposed, and so that none of the packaging overlaps the exposed portion of the card containing the magnetic strip to be encoded.
These prior art packaging systems may not fully and securely enclose the card to be sold, nor do they provide for an attractive graphical display area. This reduces the surface area of the holder useful for marketing materials and other promotional items. It may be desirable, according to one embodiment, that a packaging system be provided with an attractive graphical display that surrounds the card mounted within, while at the same time allowing a merchant to easily encode the card when purchased without first removing the card from the packaging in which the card is displayed.